Working together
By Peter Worlock
In the modern office, software needs to support collaboration. Peter Worlock looks at the solutions available.
HardCopy Issue: 52 | Found In: Business | Published: 01/05/2011 | Last Revision: 28/06/2011
Collaboration is back in the news. Within the last month there have been new developments (or at least new announcements) of tools and technologies from the big names including Microsoft, Google and IBM. The goal is to make it easier for workers to collaborate with colleagues inside the organisation, and with customers and partners outside.
At least in part, this trend is driven by the development and promotion of the Cloud, where collaboration is a natural part of the process. But while the Cloud may be the latest enabling technology, there’s nothing new about the drive towards collaboration – the term ‘groupware’ was coined more than 30 years ago, and the first successful groupware product arrived 10 years later in the form of Lotus Notes.
However the focus of collaboration has changed somewhat in the intervening period. The original offerings placed the emphasis on tools such as shared calendars, contact management and scheduling, while document management was limited by the available technology. Today shared calendars, contacts and schedules are a commonplace part of the desktop environment, regardless of the need to collaborate. Now document management is at the heart of the latest solutions.
The need for collaboration
Although large organisations have led the way in the adoption of collaboration tools, small-to-medium size business can benefit enormously in today’s economic environment. SMEs need to be more flexible, and to achieve more with fewer resources. Trends such as teleworking and hot-desking, as well as the need to use outsourced expertise and freelance workers, are all part of the drive towards collaboration. Among the benefits are:
- Lower costs for office space, travel and teleconferencing;
- Savings in staff time by eliminating the need to travel;
- Improved communications inside and outside of the organisation;
- Better project management and faster decision-making;
- Reduced IT costs;
- Improved employee satisfaction;
- Better customer experience and partner relationships.
In a new survey by Forrester Research of US and European companies who have implemented collaboration software, between 20 and 60 per cent said they had realised one or more of the above benefits, while a smaller number also reported improved innovation and lower time-to-market. Just 3 per cent said they had seen no benefit.
Steps forward
Because very large organisations view collaboration as a strategic imperative, they have an all-embracing view of the subject that includes video conferencing, social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter, blogs and wikis. For SMEs, collaboration is likely to be a much more tightly-focused subject centred on having multiple people in multiple locations working on a single project, and on the documents associated with that project. Hence the focus on document collaboration tools and on common document types such as word processor files, spreadsheets, graphics and presentations.
Smaller organisations can make use of telecommunications tools such as Web-based teleconferencing and Skype, but email is likely to be the key communications technology for the foreseeable future. For that reason, Microsoft Office tends to be the starting point for the discussion around collaboration, thanks to its dominant role in document creation and its tight integration with email, calendars and contacts.
In a limited sense, Microsoft Office has offered support for collaboration for some time. The ability to track and view edits and amendments in documents has long allowed multiple users to work on the same document, with versions emailed back and forth between team members.
Further developments have included the wider use of technologies such as network and central file storage, which mean that team members can work on a single version of the file stored centrally rather than having multiple iterations in endless email attachments.
The latest development (and challenge to Microsoft’s dominance) is the use of Web-based software and Cloud storage to reduce costs and simplify the workflow. Packaged software alternatives to Microsoft Office have long been available in the form of rivals such as Corel WordPerfect Office and the open source StarOffice/OpenOffice (now offered as LibreOffice). These days Web and Cloud-based solutions are proliferating in the form of Google Docs, and similar solutions from IBM and Oracle. Microsoft’s response has been to diversify Office in several ways, including the introduction of SharePoint for Web-based collaboration, Office Web Apps and the forthcoming Office 365.
The challenge for SMEs looking to improve collaboration in their office software suites is in choosing the right solution from this rapidly-expanding menu.
Mindjet MindManager
There are a large number of applications that add collaborative features to Microsoft Office, including many for version control, but of particular note is Mindjet’s MindManager, a mind-mapping and project management application that features extensive support for Microsoft Office.
While MindManager itself provides a central hub for brainstorming, outlining and task management, it can also import from and export to Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Project files, and display Excel content dynamically. There’s also a high level of integration with Microsoft Outlook, and MindManager users can create Outlook dashboards that display and update emails, tasks, contacts, notes and appointments.
For even higher levels of Office collaboration Mindjet offers MindManager Explorer for SharePoint, which gives MindManager access to SharePoint content, and MindManager MapShare, which gives SharePoint users access to your maps.
MindManager integrates with Office to link an element of a map to a Microsoft Outlook task.
Microsoft Office
Whatever its shortcomings (and it has several) Microsoft’s flagship product remains the gold standard in Office suites. Word is unrivalled in the word processing field, with support for footnotes, endnotes and cross-references, and nice-to-have features such as the grammar checker. Similarly, there are no serious rivals to Excel, especially in its latest incarnation with features such as Sparklines, PowerPivot and its ability to handle massive amounts of data.
Microsoft Office also shines in the interoperability of its various components, its common user interface, and the integration of Outlook for email, calendars and contacts.
Among its shortcomings are the price and the size of the suite, requiring vast quantities of disk space for a full installation. Even in a smaller installation there is the issue of complexity, since the majority of users need only a small part of Office’s extensive feature set. There’s also Microsoft’s habit of using non-standard file formats and the frequency with which it changes them.
Microsoft SharePoint
Microsoft explicitly developed Office’s collaboration capabilities with the introduction of SharePoint a decade ago. Through the release of SharePoint 2007 (integrated with Office 2007) and now the integration of SharePoint 2010 with Office 2010, the company has aimed to turn Office into a fully collaborative platform.
As with many Microsoft products, SharePoint is not a single entity but a complex set of tools and technologies that aims to address every aspect of collaboration in the organisation. It includes components that allow you to create Web portals, intranet and extranet sites and organisation-wide search capabilities, as well as providing Business Intelligence features. But the aspect of most interest here is its support for Office collaboration.
With the latest versions of SharePoint and Office you can create an online site for a project, providing a single repository of all files associated with the project and allowing all team members to co-author documents, with secure access and full version control. A Team Notebook allows multiple people to add and change content, with a clear author history. Access to documents is available from any browser on a Web-enabled platform, including mobile devices, and there are extensive security controls to ensure that only approved people can see and change documents – essential for organisations that must meet regulatory or legal standards.
For full access to all features, every team member must have Microsoft Office installed on a PC or netbook, but SharePoint 2010 also includes support for Office Web Apps to allow what Microsoft calls ‘light edits’, or access from smartphones and tablets.
Microsoft Office Web Apps
As part of the rollout of Office 2010, Microsoft also unveiled an online, Web-accessible version called Office Web Apps. However this is a long way from being a free version of Office itself with a number of limitations to features, especially when creating documents from scratch.
Office Web Apps provides limited versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint, plus OneNote, and is accessed through a Microsoft Live account, with documents stored on Microsoft’s SkyDrive service. Although the company does not claim support for all Web browsers, all of the leading platforms seem to work.
Microsoft’s online offering scores one major advantage over its competitors in that Office documents created offline are perfectly rendered. However, many features are missing in documents created within Office Web Apps. Font support is limited, for example, and the online version of Word forces you to switch between a basic text editor for writing and a non-editable ‘reading’ view to see any formatting.
From a collaborative view, the suite suffers a curious limitation in that Word documents are not available for simultaneous editing by multiple users, although that feature is supported in Excel and OneNote.
Microsoft Office 365
Building on developments in Microsoft Office, SharePoint and Office Web Apps, and replacing its existing Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), Microsoft is currently rolling out Office 365 as the mother of all Cloud-based, online, anywhere-anytime Office collaboration suites.
Not surprisingly, this hydra-headed monster is designed to be all things to all users, and comes in both small business and enterprise editions. It incorporates Microsoft’s hosted Exchange Online and SharePoint Online services, together with a Cloud version of the Lync communications platform (previously Office Communications Server), together with options for both Office Web Apps and locally-installed versions of Microsoft Office.
Two users edit the same spreadsheet using Microsoft Excel Web App in Offce 365.
Users will be able to choose among a range of features and services in a variety of subscription models ranging from around £5 per user per month for online tools only to around £20 per user per month for a full-featured service that includes Microsoft Office on the desktop.
Because Office 365 includes hosted versions of both Exchange Server and SharePoint, you get access to a full range of collaboration features. These include multi-user access and editing of documents, and the use of SharePoint’s team features, which let you control who has access to documents, allow some users to contribute but not edit documents, and manage version control. In the fully-featured version you also gain the ability to download documents, work on them within Office locally, then upload and synchronise edited versions.
Because Office 365 also incorporates Lync, you can setup and manage online meetings and instant chat, and other collaboration tools such as streamed PowerPoint presentations.
Google Apps
Managing and sharing your documents using Google Docs.
Google’s online version of the office suite arguably jump-started the race towards Cloud solutions. There’s little doubt that Microsoft’s Office Web Apps is a direct response to the facilities offered by Google Docs, and many of the features are directly comparable.
Google Apps comes in a number of variations, with the basic service available free of charge. At the heart of Google Apps is Google Docs which offers online tools for creating documents, spreadsheets, drawings and presentations that can be worked on simultaneously by up to 50 users. These integrate with Gmail and Google Calendar to give you facilities similar to those offered by Microsoft Outlook, while Google Sites lets you create secure Web pages for organising workspaces and projects, and Google Talk gives you on-line chat.
Google Apps for Business is a paid-for facility which adds a number of other services, such as Google Video for video streaming. It offers 25GB email storage per user, and will synchronise email with Android, iPhone and Blackberry devices, as well as with Microsoft Outlook. It will support as many users as you need (or can afford) and comes with a Service Level Agreement (SLA) based around 99.9 per cent uptime.
The biggest criticism of Google Docs has been the lack of file compatibility with Microsoft Office. This can still be a problem, but compatibility does seem to be getting better all the time.
LibreOffice
LibreOffice is the latest incarnation of the open source Office suite that originally reached a large audience as StarOffice, then became OpenOffice under the control of Sun Microsystems before being acquired by Oracle. Last year, the open source community announced the separate development of LibreOffice, citing fears that Oracle would either drop the product, as it had with OpenSolaris, or compromise its open source nature. As things stand, there is currently no difference between the base code of OpenOffice and LibreOffice, beyond the inclusion as standard of some OpenOffice extensions.
With component applications for word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and database, LibreOffice is widely accepted as the best alternative to Microsoft Office, being directly comparable in most features, and largely compatible in terms of file formats. Indeed, LibreOffice is almost feature-for-feature identical to Microsoft Office up to Office 2003. However, with the launch of Office 2007, Microsoft introduced the Ribbon interface that its rival lacks, making switching between the two problematical. And with Office 2010, Microsoft introduced a number of new features that LibreOffice cannot match, most notably within the spreadsheet component.
In terms of collaboration, LibreOffice largely mirrors Microsoft Office with the ability to track and manage edits to documents from multiple users. However (and obviously) it cannot compete with Microsoft’s integration with a true collaborative environment like SharePoint. Nor does it feature Microsoft’s integration with Outlook for email, calendars and contacts, although it does provide some support for the open source email client Thunderbird.
Corel Word Perfect Office
Of all the rivals to Microsoft Office, only Corel’s offering provides a comparable pedigree – WordPerfect predates Microsoft Word by a wide margin and was the leading word processor for some time until the widespread adoption of Microsoft Windows.
As a result of that track record there are still many users around the world who have stuck with WordPerfect for more than 20 years, especially in government and legal fields where WordPerfect’s long document formatting editing capabilities still outshine those of Microsoft Word. Although Corel’s suite includes perfectly usable spreadsheet and presentation tools, it is the demand for the WordPerfect word processor that largely explains the continuing presence of WordPefect Office in the market.
Significantly, WordPerfect Office also matches Microsoft for collaboration features. Corel’s suite works well with SharePoint servers to provide the essential version control and comparison features, and allows the use of a Web browser to view (although not edit) documents on the server.
The only serious limitation of WordPerfect Office is the lack of a fully-integrated email application. Corel includes the Thunderbird email client, but that itself lacks the calendar features of Microsoft Outlook. You can add those features with the use of Lightning, an open source calendar for Thunderbird, but at the cost of additional complexity.
Into the future
Recent announcements from a number of major players will complicate the picture even further.
At the risk of confusing users attracted by Google Docs, the company has also launched Google Cloud Connect, a collaborative addition to Google Docs that lets multiple users create and edit Office documents over the Web. Available as a plug-in, Cloud Connect (formerly known as DocVerse until acquired by Google a year ago) installs a toolbar in Word, Excel and PowerPoint that uploads Office documents to Google’s Cloud storage and allows specified users to edit. However, collaboration requires the documents to be converted to Google Docs format with some loss of formatting and features.
IBM has announced the launch of a Cloud-based version of its Symphony office suite in the second half of 2011, integrated with the company’s LotusLive software, which provides a form of online social network. Like LibreOffice, Symphony is largely based on version 3 of OpenOffice. IBM says that the integration with LotusLive will provide for an improved collaboration environment, with the ability to co-edit documents both inside and outside a firewall, support for version control and revision management, and integration with social network content from Facebook, Twitter and others.
In similar fashion, Oracle has announced Oracle Cloud Office, a combination of OpenOffice with some new Cloud-based collaboration features that promises to provide multiuser editing of documents from the OpenOffice apps. Details are still unclear – for example, Oracle says that the software “is compatible with legacy Microsoft office documents”, but this may not include the newer file formats. It also says you can “view documents on smartphones and tablets”, suggesting that you may not be able to edit documents on mobile devices.
Most significantly, it isn’t clear how the software will be delivered, whether as a feature-limited online service like Google Docs and Microsoft Office Web Apps, as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering, or as a paid-for extension to OpenOffice itself.
Working together
The advantages of improved collaboration are impossible to deny, even if some are hard to achieve. But the ability to have multiple people, inside and outside an organisation, share and edit documents can substantially cut costs, save time and generally improve the efficiency and effectiveness of an organisation.
If you’re looking for those benefits you have a wide variety of solutions. Which you choose will depend on what office software you currently use, whether you’re prepared to switch entirely to a new suite, or need compatibility with an archive of existing documents. Among the issues you need to consider are file and feature compatibility, and security.
While individual users may happily put up with some file incompatibilities, and workarounds such as defaulting to a common file format like RTF, or repeated export/import routines, many commercial organisations will demand complete file compatibility with their most-used formats. Although that may be achievable with some formats, such as Excel, it can be harder to find in other applications. And even where an Office suite promises the ability to read and write standard file formats, the lack of features in the applications themselves often make such compatibility meaningless as common objects like embedded video, or Excel macros, go missing, and formatting is incorrectly rendered.
With regards to feature, it’s often said that most users exploit less than 20 per cent of the power of Microsoft Office, but if you have a real need for some of the other 80 per cent, you might struggle. Excel Sparklines and pivot tables, and Word’s footnotes and references, are common examples.
With regards to security, Google, Microsoft and other SaaS providers have admitted breaches that allowed unauthorised users to access stored data. As soon as you begin to look for improved collaboration you confront the question of where your files are stored, who can view them, who can edit them, and how you track those issues.
Many organisations are subject to legal requirements, others to regulations in the health, finance and legal industries. Whichever office collaboration tools you choose, it must meet these needs.